I got an email from a good friend
in Kenai the other day who said she'd gone down to the old Columbia Wards'
Cannery I used spend my summers at as a fisherman - and the warehouse where I'd
spent so much of my time, where my locker was, where I stored supplies, used
the crane to haul shackles of web up and down from the loft, where I'd driven
my truck to grab gear, driven forklifts to haul it, where fishermen for decades
hung their nets, where I'd walked hundreds of times with my camera, was no
longer there. Gone were the beefy rafters in the egg house, where cannery
workers of all nationalities scrawled their names and the years they worked in
the plant – some of them as far back as the 1920’s, when the cannery was
rebuilt after the fire. But now that warehouse was no more. The entrepreneur
who bought the cannery after Wards' Cove shuttered it in 2000 decided it was a
bad investment and sold the warehouse for its lumber - old growth Douglas firs
made up those massive rafters. Work crews tore down the structure this past
summer, hauling the pieces away while the fishermen who used to dock there tied
their boats to buoys downriver, and like all good fishermen paid more attention
to the fish, the winds and the tides than to a piece of their history sinking
in their wake.
I've visited the cannery every
time I've returned to Kenai since I moved away in 1998. Far more so than
Indiana, where I spent my childhood, it was really where I grew up, and it had always
been a second home to me. Except for when they were rebuilding right after the
sale - putting in a restaurant and making hotel rooms out of the old fishermen
bunkhouses - it felt like a ghost town. Through the thin veil of time and
memory, I could hear in my mind fishermen long gone still laughing on the dock;
forklift backup alarms beeping as they moved fish totes into the freezer plant
from the dock; boats starting up with the throaty roar only a Jimmy can make.
I thought about what to write in tribute to this passing, and decided I
needed to re-publish the following piece. It's about a warehouse that's
fortunate to be still standing across the Inlet. Some fishermen (not
entrepreneurs) bought it a few years ago. They're trying to keep it alive and
working - not as a cannery, but as a lodge. They haven't changed it much, from
what I've been told. They're trying to keep it from going further into
disrepair. They "get" what it is that they purchased.
------------------------
Snug
Harbor Cannery
Chisik
Island, Alaska
Deck slippers sound muffled
on wood. The thick plank floor of the cannery, worn smooth by decades of
footsteps, transmits the noise of my passing with little more than a whisper. I
walk back in time. My eyes adjust to dim yellow light. I pick my way through
strewn manila line and coiled electrical cords. The warehouse echoes silently
in my head with years of engine repairs and assembly-line canning of salmon.
Rusted saws and axes still lean against rough-hewn plank walls and stout
support beams. Palette after palette of diesel boat engines wait silently in a
row, wrapped in dust-covered plastic. Nets bundled in torn and ragged burlap
bags sit piled high in dark, forgotten corners like old fat men in a steam bath.
Nestled sheets of fiberglass roofing lean against a wall beneath broken
windows.
Below my feet I can hear
the small waves of the incoming tide roll the gravel of this remote Alaskan
beach. The warehouse sits on pilings above the tide line of Tuxedni Bay,
Alaska. Mesmerized, I drift up the stairs to the web loft, where I find wooden
floors worn smooth and bare with years of dragging nets and line to racks for
mending or hooks for hanging. Outboard motors hang in a row on racks of their
own under a ceiling of huge, latticed wooden beams. The immensity of the
structure, of the beams themselves, lends a cathredral-like quality to the
experience of standing under them. They are dark and dry, old-growth Doug fir I
am told years after, with deep, rough grooves in their sides and white and
yellow words and numbers scrawled on them. “Gebenini,” “Mohr,” “Humbolt,
“Showalter,” “63,64,65,” 58, 59, 60.” “Tanaka, 34.”
Over the years, countless
cannery workers, tendermen and fishermen crawled high among these rafters to
write their names. After their names they put the dates of the summers they
spent working the cannery: from as recently as last year to well before I was
born. Filipino names, Japanese names, Italian, Norwegian, Native Alaskan. Some
with only one date after them, others with repeated, sequential numbers,
testifying to summer after summer spent working fish. The gear locker
doors below the beams display more names written in marker pen. Names crossed
out, one after another, in a legacy of the owners of the lockers’ contents,
until only one was left uncrossed: Hoyt: -xed-out; Pugh: -xed-out; Hansen:
-xed-out; “Thompson.” Behind the mute locker wire wait stores of gear: buoys,
line, nets, props. I find a piece of chalk on the floor near one locker door
and bend down and pick it up. I look up, and for a moment consider writing my
name, too. But I am only a green deckhand at the start of my first season, and
I think I haven’t yet earned the privilege. Maybe another year, if I survive.
So I put the chalk down, and walk away.
Ten years later, after ten
seasons fishing as a crew and skipper, after finally learning ropes I hadn’t
even realized were there to learn, and learning how to catch fish, fix boats
and survive rough weather, I return, this time looking for chalk. I find it,
pretty much where I'd left it.
***
Ten years after that I find
myself back again, this time with my eleven-year-old son. Together we climb the
old stairs to the loft. I show him my name on a beam near the windows, and the
years that are written next to it. There are some more to add today. It is his
third season with me, and neither of us know it’s to be our last. I ask him if
he wants to put his name up there too, next to mine. Together we find half a
piece of chalk on a table filled with old mending twine and needles. As I had
done alone so many years ago, together we climb steep steps up to the planks
that weave through the center of the latticed rafters. We lie down and stretch,
one at a time, to reach the beam waiting for us. Our beam. It’s just above the
window that looks out on Tuxedni Bay. Looks out on Snug Harbor. I add my years
to the space beyond my name, then hand him the chalk. “Hang on a minute,” I
say. I go down the stairs, and as he writes his name above mine, I take his
photograph.
***
After the film is
developed, back at home later that month we see it together: the picture is dim
and blurred, but he is there forever, more in my mind’s eye than on the film,
writing his name upon the rafters of our history, of our past, of our lives.
In her email about the Kenai
warehouse, my friend said, "I was blown away by the size of the area it
enclosed." That's true in more ways than one.